THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT

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1 PAUL PORTNER THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT ABSTRACT. The English perfect involves two fundamental components of meaning: a truth-conditional one involving temporal notions and a current relevance presupposition best expressed in terms drawn from the analysis of modality. The proposal made here draws much for the Extended Now theory (McCoard 1978 and others), but improves on it by showing that many aspects of the perfect s meaning may be factored out into independent semantic or pragmatic principles. 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Readings of the Perfect Perhaps the one thing that current analyses of the perfect agree upon is that a present perfect sentence like (1) indicates some type of connection between a past event, of Mary eating breakfast, and the time indicated by the sentence s tense, the speech time: (1) Mary has eaten breakfast already. We will see below how the various approaches attempt to make precise this connection. However, the literature has been plagued by having to account for the numerous readings of the perfect, for example: Resultative Perfect: (2) Mary has read Middlemarch. Existential Perfect: (3) The Earth has been hit by giant asteroids before (and it probably will be again). Continuative Perfect: (4) Mary has lived in London for five years. Linguistics and Philosophy 26: , Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

2 460 PAUL PORTNER (5) John has been in Baltimore since yesterday. The continuative perfect is also referred to as the universal perfect. Hot News Perfect: (6) The Orioles have won! We also find terms used like experiential perfect and current relevance perfect applying to some of the same data. A core experiential perfect might be (1), since it says something about an experience of Mary; a good example of a current relevance perfect would be (3), on the understanding that the potential for asteroid impacts is relevant to our decisions today. In this set of data, we see a wide variety of temporal relations between the event e described and the speech time s. In (2), e probably precedes s by no more than a few years; in (3) eons may have intervened, while in (6) it precedes by only moments. Contrasting with all of these cases, in (4) (5) e may either overlap or precede s, the case where they overlap being labeled the continuative perfect. The most obvious puzzle here is what accounts for the contrast between continuative and non-continuative readings, that is what allows for e and s to overlap in some cases but not others. We also see in (2) (6) a wide variety of non-temporal relations. While (2), like perhaps (6), seems to indicate a current result of a past event, (4) (5) do not have this character. They simply indicate the continuance of a past event into the present. Example (3) does not indicate a result state either, but rather points to the need to consider a fact about the past (that asteroids fell) while contemplating what may happen in the future. If it describes a victory which has just occurred, (6) seems to suggest that this event is especially noteworthy. This variety of temporal and non-temporal relations compatible with the perfect poses a challenge for any theory of its meaning. Nevertheless, I will claim that a precise, uniform analysis is possible, characterizing the meaning of the perfect in terms of a semantic and a pragmatic component: Semantic Component: The truth-conditional contribution of the perfect is temporal in nature. This aspect of its meaning is more limited than has previously been supposed, however, and crucial contrasts like that between continuative and noncontinuative readings are not based in the meaning of the perfect, or in an ambiguity, but follow from independently needed principles.

3 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 461 Pragmatic Component: The pragmatic contribution of the perfect is a presupposition which unifies all of the non-temporal relations observed in (1) (6). It is to be stated in terms of the theory of epistemic modality, allowing a precise development of such informal notions as current relevance and result state. I will also argue that a proper understanding of the present perfect requires us not to ignore the semantics of the present tense. The present tense, I will claim, has some significant semantic properties which are revealed in a comparison between the present perfect and the past perfect, and which have, in some previous analyses, been misattributed to the perfect The Central Phenomena An adequate theory of the English perfect must account for a variety of important phenomena previously noted in the literature. I present a number of these in what follows Continuative vs. Non-Continuative Readings As is illustrated in (1) (6) above, some perfect sentences receive a continuative interpretation, with the past eventuality overlapping the reference time (i.e., the speech time in present perfects), as in (4) (5), while others are incompatible with such a temporal relation. Note that something grammatical is at the root of the continuative/non-continuative contrast, not mere plausibility of some sort. Example (7a) disallows a continuative reading, although there is nothing wrong with the temporal relations that would be required (that her eating began in the past and continues at the speech time); the continuative reading becomes possible if we merely switch the embedded verb form to the progressive, as in (7b). (7)a. Mary has eaten dinner. b. Mary has been eating dinner. Another way to look at the issue is to ask why (7b) fails to require that the eating event be completely past, in contrast to (7a). If the perfect form entails that the event described under its scope be completely past in some examples, one would expect that this would also hold when that event happens to be described by a progressive. Aspectual class appears to be at the root of the continuative/noncontinuative distinction. As pointed out by Bauer (1970, see also Dowty 1979, Mittwoch 1988, Vlach 1993, Iatridou et al. 2000), an eventive present perfect always requires that the event time precede the speech time,

4 462 PAUL PORTNER as in (8a), while in many cases a stative allows the two to overlap, resulting in the continuative reading as in (8b): 1 (8)a. Mary has run a mile. Mary has run for twenty minutes. Mary has reached the finish line. Mary has slept today. b. Mary has been running for twenty minutes. Mary has understood the issue. Mary has been angry all day. Note, by the way, that the subinterval property is not at the root of pattern, as shown by the fact that Mary has slept today only has a non-continuative reading, even though Mary slept today has the subinterval property. 2 This argues against the proposal of Iatridou et al. (2000) that unboundedness is at the root of the contrast, given that they take activities to be unbounded. 3 It also argues against the Spejewski s (1997) claim that, in effect, there are no continuative perfects. She proposes that examples like those in (8b) in fact require that the event described be completely past, and claims that the apparent temporal overlap due to the fact that this completely past event can be a mere subevent of a larger event. This predicts, wrongly, 1 Note that there are stative sentences which fail to produce a continuative reading in the present perfect. We ll come back to this phenomenon in more detail in Section As pointed out by Dowty (1979), verbs like stand and lay are ambiguous. Note that (i) has a continuative reading, but (ii) does not: (i) The obelisk has stood in the piazza for over a thousand years. (ii) The protestors have stood in the lobby for an hour. (cf....havebeenstanding....) 3 Iatridou et al. (2000: 23) discuss the Greek example (i): (i) Exi kivernisi apo to 1990 mexri tora. has-3sg. governed from the 1990 until now S/he has governed from 1990 until now. (i) is not a contradiction, leading the authors to conclude that activities can give rise to continuative perfects. The data appears to be identical with the English translation, but in English at least, it seems that govern has a stative usage (for example, it takes simple present tense with no habitual reading). Note that the ability of the activity to overlap the speech time depends on an explicit assertion until now, something which differentiates it from true continuative perfects like those in (8b); therefore, it is probable that this example is actually just an existential perfect, with the adverbial locating the past eventuality just before the momentary now. Moreover, if it is known that no election inauguration has just occurred, a hearer would be likely to infer that the same person still governs the nation.

5 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 463 that any situation in which the perfect is formed from a clause with the subinterval property would allow the continuative reading. Rather, it seems that what is at issue is a concept of stativity which includes progressives and individual-level predicates like understand and be angry. The relevant concept of stativity excludes all (non-progressive) stage-level predicates, including non-dynamic ones like sleep. In what follows, I use the term stative in this sense Variability of Result State A second significant fact in need of explanation is the variable importance of what is often called the result state. An example like (2) presents initial justification for the relevance of this concept, as it seems to indicate not just that Mary read Middlemarch, but also that this reading has affected Mary in some relevant way. There are other examples which may argue in a more concrete, less merely intuitive, way that a result state is a crucial component of the perfect s interpretation. For example, suppose that Mary moved to London five years ago, and hasn t left. During this time, she became ill only once, three years ago. With this lead-in, the second sentence of example (9) is quite odd. (9) Mary has lived in London for five years. (??)She has become ill. In contrast, suppose that Londoners who have developed illnesses during the last five years are advised to go see their doctors, as their illnesses are likely due to some dangerous pollutants which were inadvertently released into the air. In that case, someone who is concerned for Mary s health may utter (9) without problem. The acceptability of (9) in this richer scenario might be attributed to the fact that the sentence supports the idea that Mary s illness has a significant current result, her need to visit her doctor. 4 4 One can doubt that we actually are dealing with a result state here. One might say that her need to see her doctor is a result of her exposure to the pollutants, not of the illness, and that the illness stands in an evidentiary relationship to her need to see the doctor, not a causal relationship. I find such an objection plausible, and indeed the analysis presented in this paper can easily account for the example in the way indicated. Nevertheless, if we exclude examples of this sort, I don t know of any convincing motivation for including a notion of result state as a formal part of the perfect s meaning, as so many contemporary analyses do. While there are plenty of other examples which generate a strong intuition that a current result is somehow relevant (such as (2)), in none of them does the proposal that a result state is part of the semantics generate testable predictions. The case of (9) at least purports to confirm a testable prediction, namely that the sentence is acceptable if the entailment that there is a relevant result state is plausible in the context, and unacceptable otherwise.

6 464 PAUL PORTNER In contrast to (9), example (3) (repeated as (10)) can be used felicitously even in a context in which it fails to imply any significant result state. (10) The Earth has been hit by giant asteroids before (and it probably will be again). The point of (10) does not seem to be that those past impacts had any lingering effects, such as the presence of craters or the extinction of certain species. Nor is the prospect of future impacts a result of the previous ones; the trajectories of whatever asteroids will hit us in the future are independent of those that hit in the past. One might propose that the result state is the speaker s belief that the earth was hit in the past, but this doesn t seem right either. One would never say: The ancient impacts of giant asteroids on the earth caused her to believe that asteroids hit the earth in the past. What caused the speaker s belief was most likely reading a textbook, watching a report on television, or something similar, not the impacts. The real point of (10) is that it provides evidence for something, not that it indicates any results Variability of Lifetime Effects Chomsky (1970) pointed out the following contrast: (11)a.?Einstein has visited Princeton. b. Princeton has been visited by Einstein. Example (11a) is odd because it suggests that Einstein is still alive. As pointed out by Inoue (1979), however, this effect is dependent on context, as witnessed by (12) (based on Inoue s (65): 576): (12) A: Which Nobel Laureates have visited Princeton? B: Let s see, Einstein has (visited Princeton), Friedman has,... We will examine Inoue s explanation for this in more detail in Section The Gutenberg Example A crucial, but often overlooked, piece of data was presented by McCoard (1978, based on Dietrich 1955): (13)??Gutenberg has discovered the art of printing. This example describes an event which took place entirely in the past and which has significant current results. Thus, the fact that it is unacceptable

7 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 465 makes two important points: that there is more to the perfect than simple temporal anteriority, and that a past event s having a significant current result is not enough to license a present perfect. As we will see, a number of contemporary analyses of the perfect cannot deal with this example, wrongly predicting it to be acceptable Incompatibility with Past Time Adverbials Perhaps the most famous property of the English present perfect is its incompatibility with past time adverbials: (14) *John has arrived yesterday. (15) John has arrived today. Klein (1992, 1994) argues that the incompatibility is limited to definite past time adverbials, citing examples like the following: (16) I know St. Thomas has Saturday evening mass. I have attended mass there on (a) Saturday. Here, on (a) Saturday is taken to be acceptable because it is indefinite. However, it seems to me rather odd to describe on (a) Saturday as a past time adverbial in the first place. In and of itself, it can describe past, present, or future intervals, and the pastness evidenced in (16) comes from the perfect, not from the semantics of the adverbial itself. Note also that (16) becomes bad if the adverbial is on a Saturday last month. For this reason, it is preferable to stick with a description of the relevant phenomenon as precluding any use of past time adverbial with the English present perfect, understanding past time adverbial to refer only to adverbials which themselves entail pastness, not any adverbial which may be used to describe a past event. I would note at this point that the contrast in (14) (15) is absent in many languages. Though I do not attempt to explain the cross-linguistic patterns in this paper, I will return to the matter briefly in Section Asymmetries between the Present Perfect and Other Perfect Forms The contrast in (14) (15) is restricted to the present perfect. As pointed out by McCawley (1971), it has no analogue in tenseless or past perfect forms: (17) Having arrived yesterday, Mary can answer our questions. (18) Mary had arrived the day before.

8 466 PAUL PORTNER This point suggests that the incompatibility between present perfect and past adverbials is tied to the present tense or the interaction between the present tense and the perfect Relevance Effects with Adverbials Spejewski (1997) points out contrasts like that in (19): (19) Has Kay paid her bills this month/??this week/??today? Given normal assumptions about one-month billing cycles, this week and today are odd because the result state identified by general knowledge (that she is up-to-date with her bills) is dependent upon her having paid her bills within the past month, not upon the more specific information that she paid in the last week or day. That is, her having paid her bills in the past week is not relevant to predicting the current result the speaker has in mind, that she is up to date with her bills Outline of the Paper The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 I sketch three previous theories of the perfect, indicating the strengths and weaknesses of each in relation to the central phenomena outlined above. Section 3 presents the analysis, beginning with theoretical background in Section 3.1, continuing with a focus on the perfect s temporal semantics in Section 3.2, and then turning to its modal presupposition in Section 3.3. Section 4 then shows how the analysis is able to explain the crucial phenomena which have proven to be problematical for previous accounts. Before moving on, I would also like to remind readers of the difference between the perfect, what will be analyzed here, and perfective aspect. The latter has to do with notions like the completion/non-completion of events, or whether they are viewed as an unanalyzed whole (e.g., Comrie 1976, Smith 1992, Kamp and Reyle 1993, Singh 1998). While the English perfect is perfective, it shares this characteristic with the simple past, and I will not be concerned with perfectivity here. 2. SOME PREVIOUS ANALYSES OF THE PERFECT The main goal of this section is to evaluate existing approaches to the perfect in light of the phenomena listed in Section 1.2. Perhaps the best existing survey is McCoard (1978). Of the approaches which he discusses and critiques, two still have contemporary supporters. Thus, I will divide this section into three parts. Sections 2.1 and 2.2 discuss these two approaches, which I will call the Indefinite Past theory and the Result State

9 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 467 theory. Then Section 2.3 discusses McCoard s Extended Now theory and its descendants. Section 2.4 summarizes the survey The Indefinite Past Theory A number of scholars have proposed theories of the present perfect which are equivalent, or nearly so, to the statement that the clause under the scope of the perfect is true at some past time, though they may admit additional pragmatic factors as also relevant. Reichenbach s (1947) analysis is the earliest formal theory with this character; he proposes that a perfect requires that the event time precede the reference time, which in the case of a present perfect must be the time of utterance. Similar ideas are presented by Montague (1973), Inoue (1979), Klein (1992, 1994), Giorgi and Pianesi (1998), and others, and though some analyses are given in terms of event structures rather than in purely temporal terms, the truth-conditional consequences appear to be the same. Stump (1985) has a slightly different view: he takes the present perfect to describe an event which is non-future, but which may be either past or present. Nevertheless, his approach is subject to some of the same difficulties as the others. Except for Stump s formulation, the indefinite past theory has difficulty with continuative perfects like (4), repeated below: (20) Mary has lived in London for five years. Here it seems that the utterance time does not follow the time when Mary lives in London. Klein attempts to explain (20) by saying that the adverbial for five years must be taken to have scope under the perfect, so that the event being described is not Mary s full life in London, but rather a Marylives-in-London-for-five-years event. This event, it is claimed, is fully past, since (20) can only be true if she is already into her sixth year in London. However, this explanation does not seem applicable to the continuative reading of (21), as pointed out by Kuhn and Portner (1997): (21) Mary has lived in London since Here, it seems that the Mary-lives-in-London-since-1966 event is still ongoing, and so the utterance time cannot follow it. Another significant problem for the indefinite past theory is the fact that the perfect interacts differently with eventive and stative clauses. Specifically, eventive clauses disallow continuative readings, while stative ones typically allow them. This contrast argues that it will not do to say simply that the temporal meaning of the perfect is either past (like Klein) or non-future (like Stump). The theory must provide an

10 468 PAUL PORTNER avenue for aspectual class to become relevant to the temporal relationship expressed. The indefinite past theory also has difficulties with the fact that in English the perfect may not cooccur with a past time adverbial. The fact is illustrated again in (22): (22)a. Mary has arrived yesterday. b. Mary arrived yesterday. The reason for this cannot simply be that, in Reichenbachian terms, the adverbial must modify the reference time; adverbials can also modify event time, as illustrated by the examples in (23): (23)a. On Tuesday I learned that Mary had arrived two days before. b. Mary has arrived only recently. In (23a), two days before clearly modifies the event time, since on Tuesday modifies the reference time. In (23b), one cannot be asserting the reference time is recent, since this implies it is past; rather, (23b) says that the event time is recent. Given that adverbials can modify the event time, both Klein and Stump provide alternative, implicature-based explanations for the pattern in (22). Stump s account is based on the idea that the perfect is a more marked construction than the simple past, and so the use of the present perfect implicates that it would have been inappropriate to use the past. However, noting that (22a) and (22b) are equivalent on his analysis (due to the contribution of yesterday, which is more specific than either the perfect or past), this implicature could never be true in the case of (22a). Thus the sentence is anomalous. Klein s explanation is similar. His idea is that, given that the adverbial in (22a) explicitly locates Mary s arrival during last week, it entails that the utterance time falls into its posttime. Thus, the use of the perfect is ruled out, since the job it does (of locating the utterance time into the event s posttime) has already been accomplished by the adverbial. Klein expresses this reasoning as a constraint, the P- Definiteness Constraint; as stated in his Reichenbachian framework, the requirement is that the event time and reference time cannot both receive a definite temporal specification. In the case of a present perfect, the reference time is equated with the speech time, so the event time may not be definitely specified as well. The adverbial in (22a) specifies the event time, violating the constraint. The asymmetries with the tenseless and past perfect sentences illustrated in (17) (18) would then follow if tenseless and past tense sentences are temporally indefinite (a difficult proposal to

11 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 469 make, given the pronoun-like nature of the past tense (Partee 1984)). One difficulty for Klein s account is that it is unclear in just what sense past time adverbials are definite ; it would appear that the past event is given a more definite location in John has arrived within the last hour or John has just now arrived than in *John has arrived in the 1980s. Moreover, as discussed in Section 1, it appears that the relevant constraint is against past time adverbials in general; definiteness doesn t really seem to have a role to play. Another point is that the indefinite past theories have great difficulties with the Gutenberg example, repeated here as (24): (24)??Gutenberg has discovered the art of printing. There is no reason why an indefinite past interpretation of the present perfect should not be fine here. Gutenberg s discovery of printing did occur before the present time. Since the sentence does not have an offending past adverbial like (22a), the theory doesn t give us a reason why it should be counted as pragmatically anomalous. Finally, I cannot see that the indefinite past theory in this form has anything to say about the relevance effects illustrated by (25): (25) Has Kay paid her bills this month/??this week/??today? In light of these difficulties, a supporter of the indefinite past theory might argue that the core indefinite past semantics should be maintained, but augmented with some additional pragmatic constraint. Inoue (1979) does just this, combining an indefinite past semantics with a pragmatic analysis based on the idea of current relevance. She proposes that the present perfect indicates a relation of mutual entailment between the proposition expressed by the perfect sentence and the discourse topic, a contextually given proposition (p. 574ff.). For example, recall (12), repeated as (26). (26) A: Which Nobel Laureates have visited Princeton? B: Let s see, Einstein has (visited Princeton), Friedman has,... Inoue paraphrases the topic for B s utterance as Talking about the Nobel Prize winners visiting Princeton. Moreover, Inoue suggests that, in order for the topic to be currently relevant, a situation of that kind be repeatable at the speech time. 5 According to this, (26) is acceptable because it is possible for Nobel Prize winners to visit again. I find the core of Inoue s 5 This differs from the repeatability condition noted by Yeh (1996) for Mandarin guo. According to Yeh, guo requires that an event of the kind described by the perfect sentence itself be repeatable, a requirement clearly too strong for the English perfect.

12 470 PAUL PORTNER intuition to be quite attractive: The proposition expressed by the perfect sentence is relevant in that it is in a logical relation to another which is at issue in the conversation. My own proposal below will develop this intuition. In addition, the repeatability condition allows an explanation of the lifetime effects mentioned above. The implicit discourse topic for (11a) (Einstein has visited Princeton) would be something like Talking about Einstein s visits to American universities. Since the perfect requires that situations of this kind be repeatable, this would imply that Einstein is alive. Since he is not, the sentence is odd. In the context given by (26), however, (11a) is fine because the discourse topic there does not specifically have to do with Einstein. Presumably the passive (11b) is natural out of context because it suggests an implicit topic similar to that in (26) and unlike that of (11a), due to the correlation between subjecthood and topichood in English. A similar explanation might be suggested for (25). Assuming that the topic here is Talking about whether Kay is up-to-date with her bills, it seems that the logical relation between this topic and Kay paid her bills this month is different from that it bears to Kay paid her bills this week. Specifically, that Kay is up-to-date contextually entails the former, but not the latter. This difference could be attributed to the mutual entailment requirement proposed by Inoue. Despite these advantages, there are a number of problems with Inoue s formulation of the current relevance requirement. At the most basic level, it is not clear what proposition she intends to indicate with Talking about the Nobel Prize winners visiting Princeton. It does not seem plausible to take the conversation s topic to be we are talking about the Nobel Prize winners that have visited Princeton the topic has to do with the fact that certain individuals have visited Princeton, not the fact that somebody is talking about them (the latter is more a topic for a linguistics paper). A more plausible candidate is something like some Nobel Prize winners have visited Princeton, and Einstein has (visited Princeton) does contextually entail this; however, what Inoue proposes is a relation of mutual entailment, and even adding in background assumptions from the common ground, the proposition that some Nobel Prize winners have visited Princeton will certainly not entail that Einstein has visited Princeton. The requirement of mutual entailment itself seems questionable in any case, as this would mean that the topic proposition and the sentence itself are informationally equivalent, given background assumptions. If the two are equivalent, why would the perfect sentence be asserted at all? Like the other indefinite past theorists, Inoue s approach also has problems with the continuative/non-continuative contrast, the adverbial facts,

13 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 471 and the Gutenberg example (24). With regard to the latter, there are plenty of plausible discourse topics to which (24) would be relevant that don t specifically relate to Gutenberg, for example Talking about important discoveries by Germans. Nevertheless, such a context fails to rescue (24). I therefore conclude, following McCoard (1978), that we need to abandon the simple temporal semantics of the indefinite past theory The Result State Theory Another major family of theories takes a sentence in the present perfect to assert the present existence of a state which results from the past event described under the scope of have. The problem here is to identify the right result state. Any past event will have many current results and if we take the perfect to simply indicate the existence of some result state, it will be truth-conditionally equivalent to an indefinite past (as pointed out by Kuhn and Portner 1997). This would be a bad consequence, given the problems just noted for the Indefinite Past theory. The same point goes for the suggestion, which has been made to me numerous times in conversation, that (2) simply asserts the present existence of a state of Mary having read Middlemarch. Clearly this state, if there is such a state, will hold at any time following the reading event. This approach therefore makes exactly the same predictions with regard to the temporal properties of perfect sentences as the Indefinite Past theory. For these reasons, some supporters of the Result State analysis have elaborated upon it in various ways, developing the idea that a perfect sentence doesn t just assert the existence of some result, or a very weak one like a state of having read Middlemarch, but rather picks out a particular, relevant result. Smith (1992), who very clearly demonstrates the need for this kind of elaboration, identifies the result state with the denotation of the subject having some relevant property, while Moens and Steedman (1988) appeal to general knowledge, with the idea that the perfect is only acceptable if one can identify a current state which is both relevant and contingent upon the past event described under the scope of the perfect. Spejewski (1997) attributes the contrast in (27) to Moens and Steedman s notion of contingency: (27) Has Kay paid her bills this month/??this week/??today? According to Spejewski, this week and today are odd because the result state identified by general knowledge (that she is up-to-date with her bills) is contingent upon the bills having been paid during the past month, not on their having been paid in a more specific time frame. However, contingency is the wrong tool for explaining this phenomenon. Contingency,

14 472 PAUL PORTNER as utilized by Moens and Steedman, is a relation between eventualities (e.g., events and states). Note that if she paid her bills only once in the past month, and it was this morning, the same event of bill-paying would be described by the tenseless phrase Kay pay her bills this month/this week/today, whichever adverbial is chosen. If the current state of being upto-date on her bills is contingent on this event, contingency will hold no matter which adverbial was used as part of its description. I conclude from this that a relation between eventualities is not the right tool for explaining (27); rather, some relation between propositions, as on Inoue s account, is. In effect, what differentiates the adverbials in (27) is the fact that Kay didn t pay her bills within the past month would allow the inference that she s not up-to-date, while Kay didn t pay her bills within the past week would not. Another problem for Moens and Steedman s view comes from the Gutenberg example (24). As pointed out by McCoard, the fact that it is not acceptable seems devastating for a relevance-based result state theory. It is obvious that the past event of Gutenberg discovering printing has easily identifiable results which are quite relevant to our lives today. Even highlighting those results ( Isn t printing great! ) doesn t help the sentence s acceptability. Smith is in a better position with this example. Since she identifies the result state with the subject s referent having some property, she can appeal to the fact that Gutenberg is dead, and so lacking in relevant properties, to explain the unacceptability. In this way, Smith s analysis straightforwardly handles the lifetime effect in (11). As a consequence of its success with (11), though, Smith s theory has problems dealing with the contexts in which the lifetime effect doesn t hold, such as (12). One way of looking at this would involve modifying her view to identify the relevant result with some property of the topic of the sentence, rather than its subject (cf. McCawley 1971). 6 If we take the topic in (12) to be Princeton, it does seem that the point of the sentence is to indicate some property which Princeton has. Unfortunately, modifying Smith s theory in this way removes the explanation of why the Gutenberg example (24) is bad, given that even explicitly marking another entity as topic (Speaking of the printing press...) fails to improve it. In addition, (28) below is problematical for any approach along these lines: (28) It has already snowed quite a bit. 6 This possibility was brought to my attention by Manfred Krifka. As mentioned above, Inoue (1979) relates the use of the perfect to the discourse topic, but takes topics to be propositions, not entities.theintuitionthattopicalityisrelevant tolifetimeeffectsisshared by these two approaches, but the implementations are quite different.

15 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 473 Sentence (28) contains no referential terms which could function as the topic. This approach would thus have to allow the topic of a sentence (here perhaps an implicit location) not to be overtly represented in the sentence. However, allowing unrealized topics to play a role in the perfect s meaning leaves us with no explanation for why such an implicit topic is unable to save the Gutenberg example. In a similar way, the Result State Theory appears to have difficulties explaining the continuative/non-continuative contrast. At first glance, the idea that an event must have a significant current result would seem to predict that the eventuality must be completely past. This would rule out continuative readings altogether. If, on the other hand, we were to allow that eventualities which began in the past but which are still on-going can have current results, there s no reason why eventive sentences should always lack continuative readings. What would be needed is a principle to the effect that states which partially precede and overlap a time t can have results at t, while an event must be completely finished before t in order to have results at t. I can t see any justification for distinguishing the causal powers of events and states in this way. When it comes to explaining the incompatibility of present perfect with past time adverbials, the Result State theory is in worse shape than the Indefinite Past theory. The Result State theory implicitly makes reference to two times, the speech time (when the state must hold) and some past time (when the eventuality which caused this current state occurred). As with the Indefinite Past theory, the obvious approach to the incompatibility of the present perfect with past adverbials is to say that adverbials are only permitted to modify the time at which the result holds. But as noted above, this fails in light of data like (23). Nor is it possible to adopt Stump s or Klein s analyses, since they rely on the specifics of their own (Indefinite Past) semantic proposals. Finally, I turn to the most direct argument against result state analyses. The relevant data are existential perfects like (3), repeated here as (29): (29) The Earth has been hit by giant asteroids before (and it probably will be again). As was discussed at some length in Section 1.2.2, there need not be any current, relevant results of the Earth s being hit by giant asteroids for (29) to be acceptable. 7 7 Of course this example may be used to indicate concrete results of the ancient impacts. My point here is simply that it need not. The adverb before and parenthetical it probably will be again tends to favor the type of context I wish to focus on.

16 474 PAUL PORTNER 2.3. The Extended Now Theory McCoard (1978) argues that the meaning of the perfect places the event described within the Extended Now, an interval of time which begins in the past and includes the utterance time (see also Bennett and Partee 1978, Dowty 1979, Vlach 1993, Spejewski 1996, 1997, Anagnostopoulou et al. 1998, 8 Iatridou et al. 2000). The intuitive idea of the Extended Now is that we typically count a longer stretch of time than the momentary now as the present for conversational purposes. Its exact duration is contextually determined, since what we count as the present in this sense may vary depending on the conversational topic. The Extended Now theory seems to be in a reasonable position to explain the Gutenberg example (13)/(24), since an interval extending back to the time of Gutenberg s discovery is plausibly not a reasonable Extended Now in any conversation in which it would naturally be uttered. While I will follow the general idea of the Extended Now theory, it is not sufficient as it stands. First of all, it has difficulty explaining the incompatibility of the present perfect with past time adverbials. The situation here is quite similar to the Result State theory. If the adverbial has scope over the perfect, so that the adverbial modifies the Extended Now (in effect the speech time ), the example is correctly predicted to be unacceptable. However, if the adverbial modifies the event time (the scope relation is reversed) there should be no problem. We know that it must be possible for adverbials to modify event time from examples like (23). 9 In general, the variability of result state implications are not problematical for the Extended Now theory, since it denies the relevance of result states altogether. Nevertheless, some of the data which we considered in terms of result state implications are problematical. Recall (9), repeated here as (30): 8 Anagnostopoulou et al. talk about the perfect interval, but this seems to be another name for the Extended Now. They focus on deriving continuative vs. existential readings from the underlying Aktionsart and the nature of the adverbials present. Spejewski s paper, confirmed by personal communication, suggests that she might support incorporating some type of result state idea into the Extended Now approach. However, her analysis does not do this as it stands, so I will disuss it along with the other Extended Now analyses. 9 The theory of Spejewski (1998) postulates two reference times for present perfects: one containing now and the event, and the other containing just the event. This latter reference time is required to abut now. Spejewski is able to predict that a past time adverbial cannot modify either of these, but this still leaves open the question of why an adverbial cannot modify the time of the event. Note that allowing the sentence-final adverbial to modify the second reference time will not provide an adequate semantics for (23), and this is why she adopts the proposal that the past perfect is ambiguous.

17 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 475 (30) (i) Mary has lived in London for five years. (ii) (??)She has become ill. Since (30)(i) is acceptable, the contextually provided Extended Now must be able to be at least five years long. So (ii) should be fine (and true), but it is unacceptable. The only way out of this difficulty, as far as I can tell, would be to claim that the Extended Now for (i) is not maintained for (ii), but then the question is how and why it changes. At first glance, (i) would appear to add confidence to the idea that the Extended Now is five years long, and not suggest that it should be shortened. The Extended Now theory has little to say about the other phenomena we have been concerned with. It doesn t address the connection between aspectual class and continuative readings. Nor does it explain the variable lifetime effects or the relevance effects that show up with adverbials, although it might adopt Inoue s explanation in terms of a current relevance requirement. And finally, it fails to explain the asymmetries with tenseless and past perfects; the best it can do is postulate an ambiguity, offering past perfects an extra interpretation not available with the present perfect (e.g., Spejewski 1997) Summary Table 1 summarizes how each of the theories discussed fares with respect to the phenomena outlined in Section 1.2. An indication of maybe means that, in my judgment, an explanation by theory in question is possible but problematical for reasons given above. 3. ATEMPORAL-MODAL ANALYSIS OF THE ENGLISH PERFECT This section presents a theory of the present perfect which can explain the facts outlined in Section 1. Before turning to details, I would like to elaborate a bit on how I will approach the full range of data. Among the phenomena discussed in Section 1, most will be explained in terms of temporal properties of sentences in the perfect. The most novel feature of this aspect of the analysis is that the relevant temporal properties will be shown not to be based in the meaning of the perfect itself, but rather to follow from other components of the sentence. Specifically, the continuative/noncontinuative contrast falls under a general principle pertaining to aspectual class which is also implicated in sequence of tense phenomena and temporal interpretation in discourse. The Gutenberg example will be explained in a way parallel to the Extended Now theory, but will be linked to a unique

18 476 PAUL PORTNER TABLE I Indefinite past theory Result state theory Extended now theory Continuative/non-continuative contrast NO MAYBE NO Variability of YES (result state NO YES (result state is irrelevant, but result state is irrelevant) problems remain with (9)/(30)) Variability of MAYBE (Inoue s MAYBE (if we accept NO (but we might adopt lifetime effects version of the theory) Smith s approach) Inoue s explanation) Gutenberg example NO MAYBE (if we accept YES Smith s approach) a Incompatibility with MAYBE (if we accept NO NO past time adverbials Klein s explanation) Asymmetries with MAYBE (if we accept NO NO tenseless/past perfects Klein s explanation) Current relevance MAYBE (Inoue s NO (but we might adopt NO (but we might adopt version of the theory) Inoue s explanation) Inoue s explanation) a But Smith cannot simultaneously explain the Gutenberg example and the variability of lifetime effects.

19 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 477 TABLE II Continuative/noncontinuative contrast Variability of result state Variability of lifetime effects Gutenberg example Incompatibility with past time adverbials Asymmetries with tenseless/past perfects Relevance effects Temporal semantics (not specific to perfect) Modal presupposition of perfect proposal concerning the semantics of the present tense. The interactions with adverbials (in both the present and past tenses) are attributed to details of the semantics of the adverbials in combination with ideas about the present tense. The variable importance of result states to the meaning of the perfect and the relevance effects will follow from the secondary aspect of the meaning of the perfect, a current relevance presupposition best framed in terms of modal semantics. The lifetime effects will be explained in terms of both semantic and pragmatic factors. To summarize, see Table Background Assumptions Temporal Semantics With regard to the temporal semantics of the perfect, I make two main background assumptions: a neo-davidsonian event semantics and Reichenbachian semantics for tense. Concerning the former, it is possible to do everything needed here with very conservative assumptions about what eventualities are like: The set of eventualities is divided into events and states. As mentioned above, I include the eventualities described by progressive sentences among the states, and exclude stage-level predicates, including non-dynamic ones; if one doesn t like this use of the term state, the class consisting of progressives and individual-level states may be given some other name (cf. Smith 1999, for example). Eventualities have a part/whole structure paralleling that of ordinary objects (cf. Bach

20 478 PAUL PORTNER 1986). In order to avoid unnecessary debates, and to make things simpler, I will assume that eventualities are concrete objects with common-sense identity criteria. If John walks across the street to the store quickly, there is one overall event, not a multiplicity as some theories of events would have it (e.g., John s crossing the street, John s walking to the store, John s walking quickly, and perhaps more), though this event of course has spatiotemporally defined subevents. A more elaborated theory of situations or events would not be incompatible with what I say below, but would not add anything to it either. The primary purpose for assuming an event-based semantics is that it makes it easy to incorporate the relevance of aspectual class to the continuative/non-continuative contrast. If the analysis were given in terms of an event-free framework, it would be necessary to adopt specific definitions of the aspectual classes in terms of the temporal properties of sentences. Moreover, the event-based semantics allows one to work within a close analogue of Reichenbach s semantic framework, simply exchanging speech event for speech time, and so forth. Since Reichenbach s analysis is so well-known, this will allow the essential ideas of the present theory to come through most clearly. For the sake of completeness, I would like to draw out a few basic ideas made by the Reichenbachian approach to tense semantics. Tense relates the speech time to a reference time. The reference time may be either provided by extralinguistic context or fixed through some overt, compositional means. In addition, I take from the Reichenbachian tradition the idea that the perfect is labeled an aspectual construction because it concerns the relationship between the sentence s reference time and its event time. Note that the term event time is actually a bit inaccurate, because it will be applied to stative sentences as well, but I will stick with the familiar terminology. Reichenbach s model has one feature which is often glossed over, but which for my purposes it is important to bring out. In his theory, not only do linguistic forms like the perfect have meaning; their absence can also have meaning. Thus, consider Reichenbach s interpretation of several forms: Present: e, r, s Present Perfect: e<r, s Past: e, r < s Past Perfect: e<r<s Obviously the perfect indicates e<r, and the past indicates r<s. But it should also be noted that the absence of the perfect indicates e, r, and the absence of the past indicates r, s. While the absence of the past is,

21 THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT 479 of course, typically called the present, morphological evidence may be taken as suggesting that the present is mere lack of past; as we ll see below, Giorgi and Pianesi take such a view with regard to Italian. When we turn to the aspectual part of the paradigm, matters are more striking. There is no generally accepted positive category which is seen as occurring in all non-perfect sentences, but clearly we do not want to say that the nonperfect forms are unspecified for the e/r relation. The non-perfects in the paradigm consistently imply coincidence between event and reference time (i.e., e, r) as part of their meaning. We can represent this idea compositionally within Reichenbach s framework by proposing a null [-perf] morpheme whose semantics is to assert that e and r coincide Modality For the purposes of this paper, I need only make use of a fairly simple theory of modality. I adopt the analysis of modals as dependent on a contextually-supplied parameter of interpretation, the conversational background (also known as the modal base) discussed by Kratzer (1977, 1981, 1991). We will see how this works momentarily. The ideas that will be presented in this paper could be formalized within a variety of other contemporary frameworks for the analysis of modality as well. In fact what I will present is a simplification of Kratzer s views, in that she also makes use of a second parameter of interpretation, the ordering source. A fairly simple analysis is adequate for understanding the semantics of the perfect, so for clarity I will stick with the analysis in terms of conversational backgrounds alone. In general, an approach to modality will be useful for dealing with the issues discussed here to the extent that it makes explicit the ways in which information present in the conversation contributes to the semantics of epistemic modals. A conversational background is a function which provides, for each index, a set of propositions. This set of propositions determines the set of accessible worlds relevant for the interpretation of modals. For example, taking indices to be world-utterance situation pairs, a deontic modal like that in (31) utilizes a conversational background that maps each worldsituation pair <w, u> onto the set of propositions ideally true according to the law in w and u: (31) Twelve-year-olds must not buy beer. This set might look something like the following: (32) L <w,u> = {..., Children under the age of nineteen do not buy beer,...,thereisnomurder,...}

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